Rally backfires

Published on 03/09/2012 00:00

Any sympathy I felt previously for the No To Brand Israel movement evaporated on Saturday night in the face of their childish and churlish interruptions of the final performance of Hora at the Edinburgh International Festival.

However, while staging its demonstration outside the Playhouse was a worthy gesture that had me on the brink of tearing up my ticket and leaving, the mindless and cowardly bullying of 11 artists within left me only with the desire to throw away in disgust the pro-Palestinian pamphlet I’d been handed earlier.

With their tediously formulaic and methodical slogans, I was put in mind not of enlightened, Gandhian satyagraha, but rather of how right-wing groups of the past have desecrated what they decreed was “decadent” art, attempting to pummel an audience into accepting their viewpoint rather than attempting to convince them of its correctness.

Indeed, to dignify the shambolic intermittent screaming match with the label of “protest” would be to tarnish the name of worthy protests worldwide of past and present; what I and the rest of my fellow audience members experienced was bullying, plain and simple. The audience’s only reaction to each and every interruption of Hora was not to join in the shouting but instead to produce a growing tidal wave of applause, culminating in a standing ovation – not for the bellowers, but for the embattled but not embittered performers. I expect that, by the end of the night, there were many like myself who had gone in supporting Palestinian rights only to leave supporting the 11 dancers of Batsheva infinitely more.

Marc David Jacobs

Wardlaw Place

Gorgie, Edinburgh